


The Conclusion

by dinaerys



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 18:07:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 372
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13552761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinaerys/pseuds/dinaerys
Summary: A moment in the chaos of the ending





	The Conclusion

**Author's Note:**

> I just found this in an email from myself, to myself, from like 4 years ago. I think I wrote it? I have vague memory that I did. Anyway, figured I'd post it. (If it actually isn't mine please let me know, there's literally nothing in the email but the narrative)

"Bucky..."

A single word, breathed in the bubble of chaos that surrounded them.

Outside the glass, the flaming fragments of all that Steve had known rained on the muddy Potomac like heavenly judgement upon Sodom and Gomorrah. Shouts rang from the interior of the carrier, cries of fear and loss and grief for the people that now burned with their ships. Somehow, the fire had even latched onto the metal girders that formed the skeletons of the ships; they warped and twisted like serpents in the inferno as they fell to earth. But here, protected in the crystalline belly of the final gunship, a horrible tableau had taken shape in the stillness.

It was interesting, Steve's mind whispered as he braced behind his shield, how similar they had ended up. Blue eyes looked pleadingly into blue eyes, receiving nothing but an icy, flat glare in return, the aim of the pistol currently locked on to him unwavering. The white star that adorned Steve's shield caught the light of the blaze outside, turning it bright red, a cruel twin to the bloody brand placed by the people who had ripped Bucky apart and reassembled him in their sick design. People who had taken Bucky and Peggy and everyone he had ever known from him; who had nearly destroyed the civilized world with their violence and cruelty; people who had been using Steve as a mindless attack dog, and who he would have unknowingly defended with his life. It turned his stomach to think about how he had been used by the very organization he had once sacrificed his entire world to defeat.

They couldn't have even left it at locking him away in the ice while the world aged around him and he lost all the people he'd cared about, though. No, they had to take the one person who mattered most and make him their own, restructure the very fabric of him into something wholly alien to Steve. Take him away utterly and irrevocably, only to return and dangle their final twisted victory just out of his reach.

And so they stand in silence, the super soldier with a shattered heart and the assassin with none, as the world crumbles around them.


End file.
